Emotional labor is the regulation of emotional displays as part of a work role. To date, minimal research has considered how spirituality and religion impact the performance and consequences of emotional labor, which is an important omission given a growing awareness that religion and spirituality are important components of people’s lives that continue to inform their feelings, thoughts, and behaviors while at work. Accordingly, we review the literature on emotional labor and develop a series of research questions that focus on issues such as the interplay between organizational and religious expectations for emotional displays toward others, as well as the ability of religious support and beliefs to buffer the negative effects of emotional labor on individual employees. Our hope is that these ideas spark interdisciplinary research on emotional labor that draws on a wider body of perspectives in management.

In this study, the authors focused on the context of physical disabilities (i.e., one’s age when a disability manifests and the severity with which it impacts major life activities) to better understand how disabilities influence vocational self-efficacies. Consistent with Social Cognitive Career Theory, age of onset moderated the relationship between disability severity and self-efficacies in the Realistic, Artistic, Social, and Conventional vocational domains. Specifically, disability severity had a strong, negative impact on self-efficacies for people who became physically disabled later in life. In contrast, the relationship between disability severity and self-efficacy was nonsignificant for people who became disabled in early childhood. These findings held across Holland’s Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional domains when controlling for a variety of other person inputs and domain-specific learning experiences.

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